Money
Accounting and finance questions
Somebody has to answer for the money, and in a Parent Carer Forum that person has a different job title in every forum we meet. Some forums have a treasurer. Plenty do not, and the question lands with the chair, a trustee, a part-time administrator, or a finance officer at the charity that hosts the forum. Sometimes the whole committee decides together and nobody owns it in between.
This page is written for whoever that is where you are. It assumes no finance background and no knowledge of how we work, and every answer on it is one we can stand behind. If your committee needs something here in writing for a meeting, ask us and we will send it.
How you pay
We invoice your forum once a year, and you pay by bank transfer. We raise the invoice against a purchase order where you use one, and we will put your reference on it if you tell us what it is. We take no card details and store none, so there is nothing to keep on file and nothing to renew when a card expires.
Prices exclude VAT, which we add at the standard rate. Paying for a year costs 10 months of the monthly rate, so committing annually saves two months against paying month by month.
Every forum starts with a free trial of 3 months. The trial begins when whoever leads your forum agrees the terms and presses the button, so it never quietly runs down while your committee is still deciding.
What the price follows
Your price follows the number of people who hold an active membership of your forum. Parent carers count, and so does the team that runs it. That is the whole number, and there is nothing else metered: working groups, forms, documents, meetings, storage and the member app are all included, and adding somebody to a working group costs nothing.
Growing your membership does eventually move you up a band, because a bigger forum is a bigger forum to run. Everything inside a band stays flat however much you use it, so the price leaves you free to ask parent carers what they think as often as you like.
Ask us for the figure for a forum your size and we will send it, along with the band above and below yours so you can see where you sit.
If your forum is hosted by another organisation
Many forums are hosted by a charity, run their finances through it, or have it hold the bank account. Where the host organisation is the one contracting with us, the invoice is addressed to that organisation under its own name and registered address, so it matches your purchase ledger instead of arriving under a name your finance system has never seen. Tell us who to bill and we will set it up that way.
If an invoice goes unpaid
We will talk to you first. Budgets are late, grants are slow and treasurers go on holiday, and none of that is a reason to make a forum's year harder than it already is.
If an invoice stays unpaid we may suspend the forum, which stops it accepting new members and takes it off the public directory. Everybody keeps their account, every record stays readable, and you can still export it. We keep your forum's records whatever is owed, and a bill is something we settle with you while your work stays safe.
Paying for it from your participation grant
You may be able to pay for Forum from your Parent Carer Participation Grant as a participation or administration cost. Check your own grant conditions, and ask your adviser at Contact if you are unsure, because the answer depends on how your own grant is written.
We can give you a short written summary of what the platform is and what it costs, in a form you can put in front of your committee or attach to a grant report.
Getting your data out
Your records belong to your forum. You can export them at any time while your subscription is running, without asking us and without a fee.
If you decide to leave, you can ask us for an export for up to 30 days after your agreement ends, and we delete what remains after that. Leaving with everything you put in is how this should work, and it is how we have built it.
Accessibility
We build to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Colour contrast and control labelling are checked automatically on every build, and each release runs a manual script on a real device with a screen reader and text scaled to 200%.
We have not commissioned an independent accessibility audit. We say so here, and we will say so again if you ask us in a procurement questionnaire.
Who you are contracting with
Forum by Sendsorta is provided by Sendsorta Limited, registered in England and Wales with company number 15313070, whose registered office is 71-75 Shelton Street, London, England, WC2H 9JQ. Our terms set out the agreement in full, and our privacy policy covers what we do with information.
Something this page does not answer
Email info@sendsorta.co.uk and tell us what your committee needs to know. A real person answers, and if the question is one other forums are also asking we will add it here. Our help centre covers the rest of running a forum.